Synopsis for
The Reader (2008) More at IMDbPro »

The movie begins in 1995 Berlin, where a well-dressed man named Michael Berg is preparing breakfast for a woman whom has stayed the night with him. The two part awkwardly, and as Michael watches a Berlin S-Bahn pass by outside, the film flashes back to another tram in 1958 Neustadt. An unhappy-looking teenaged Michael (David Kross) gets off but wanders around the streets afterwards, finally pausing in the entryway of a nearby apartment building where he starts to vomit. Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), the tram Conductor, comes in and assists him in returning home. Michael is diagnosed with scarlet fever and must rest at home for the next three months. All Michael can do is examine his stamps and bide his time.

After he recovers, he returns to the apartment building to deliver a bouquet of flowers to Hanna at her apartment and thanks her. She is matter of fact with him but asks him to escort her to work on the tramline. However, when she catches him spying on her as she dresses he runs away in shame. When he returns to apologize a few days later, she seduces him. He persuades her to tell him her name -- Hanna. Michael returns to her every day after school, rejecting the clear interest of girls his own age. The two begin an affair that lasts through that summer. Their liaisons, at her apartment, are characterized by him reading literary works he is studying in school to her, such as ''The Odyssey'', "The Lady with the Dog" and ''The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn''. He sells his stamps so they can go on a bicycling tour in the countryside. When Hanna is promoted by the tram company, she becomes unsettled, and snaps at Michael when he tries to read her Chekhov's "The Lady with the Dog." They make love one last time and she then moves away without telling him where she is going. Michael is heartbroken.

Eight years later (1966), Michael attends Heidelberg Law School. As part of a special seminar taught by Professor Rohl (Bruno Ganz), a camp survivor, he observes a trial of several women who were accused of letting 300 Jewish women die in a burning church when they were SS guards on the Death marches following the 1944 evacuation of Auschwitz concentration camp. Michael is stunned to see that Hanna is one of the defendants. He visits a former camp himself to try to come to terms with this. The trial divides the seminar, with one student angrily saying there is nothing to be learned from it other than that evil acts occurred. He tells Rohl that the older generation of Germans should kill themselves for their failure to act then and now.

The key evidence is the testimony of Ilana Mather, a young Jewish woman who has written a memoir about how she and her mother survived. When Hanna testifies, unlike her fellow defendants, she admits that she was aware Auschwitz was an extermination camp and that the ten women she chose during each month's were subsequently gassed. She denies authorship of a report on the barn fire, despite pressure from the other defendants, but then admits it when asked to provide a handwriting sample. In the audience, Michael then realizes Hanna's secret: she is illiterate and has made many of her life choices to conceal that. Even her choice to join the SS was made because of her desire to avoid a job promotion meaning she would have had to reveal her illiteracy. Without being specific, Michael informs Rohl that he has information favorable to one of the defendants but is not sure what to do since the defendant herself wants to avoid disclosing this. Rohl tells him that if he has learned nothing from the past there is no point in having the seminar.

Hanna receives a life sentence for her role in the church deaths while the other defendants get terms of a few years. Michael meanwhile marries, has a daughter but remains emotionally withdrawn. His marriage ends and he becomes distant from his daughter. Rediscovering his books and notes from the time of his affair with Hanna, he re-establishes contact with her by reading some of those works into a tape recorder. He sends the cassettes and another tape recorder to her in prison. Eventually she uses these to teach herself to read the books themselves from the prison library, and writes back to him.

Michael does not write back or visit, but keeps sending tapes, and in 1988, the prison's warden writes to him to seek his help in arranging for her after her forthcoming release. He reluctantly agrees to sponsor Hanna. He finds an apartment and job for her but when he visits her a week before she is to be released, he is aloof to her. She tells him that before the trial, she never thought about what she did as a SS guard, but thinks about nothing else now. After he leaves, she commits suicide and leaves a note to Michael and a tea tin with cash in it. In her will, she asks Michael to give her life's savings to the family of one of the prisoners at Auschwitz.

Later, Michael travels to New York. He meets Ilana (Lena Olin) and confesses his past relationship with Hanna to her. He tells her that Hanna was illiterate for most of her life but that her suicide note told him to give both the cash, some money she had in a bank account and the tea tin to Ilana. After telling Michael there is nothing to be learned from the camps and that he should go to the theater if he is seeking catharsis. Michael suggests that he donate the money to an organization that combats adult illiteracy, preferably a Jewish one, and she agrees. Ilana keeps the tea tin since it is similar to one she herself had owned before being sent to the camps, where it was taken from her to be melted down.

In 1995, Michael reunites with his daughter, Julia (Hannah Herzsprung), who has just returned from a year in Paris. He admits his failings as a father and drives her to a church that he and Hanna had visited during their bicycle tour nearly forty years earlier. He shows her Hanna's grave and begins to tell her his and Hanna's story.